Victoriana
by Sequitur
Summary: Companion collection of shorts to "Gentlemen of Last Resort."  Victorian AU.  Now up: the tragic history of the mysterious Lady David.
1. Unexpected

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote a story called _Gentlemen of Last Resort_, which starts a Victorian AU in which Gibbs, Anthony, and Timothy investigate unusual problems, aided by Dr. Mallard, his ward Abigail, the mysterious Lady David, and (occasionally) the frustrated Inspector Fornell. A sequel story is in the works (and Richefic is also writing something in the same universe, which is the cause of much celebration). This is not the sequel, it's just a series of one-shots set in the same universe addressing little questions people have asked about the 'verse or its characters, and filling in little gaps. Some of the stories are pretty short, so I don't want to start a new story for each of them, so they'll all go in as chapters in this companion collection of miscellany. Characters will vary.

First up—how Gibbs and Anthony set up house together!

()

**Unexpected**

Gibbs prided himself on always having the advantage. He was a man not easily surprised.

Which was, of course, why Anthony was so damnably frustrating—no one, no matter how astute in the ordinary way of things, could thoroughly anticipate coming down the stairs in the morning and finding Anthony asleep on the parlor floor. At least Anthony was asleep, and so would not have the satisfaction of seeing Gibbs momentarily startled—and Gibbs _could _have the satisfaction of frowning over the wayward young man without having to hide it.

There were bruises on Anthony's face. Bruises, and he had slept on the floor instead of the sofa—slept through the night with his head pillowed on his arm.

Gibbs scowled. He went and made a pot of Anthony's loathsome tea, the kind thick with sweetness—a courtesy he most usually refused to offer whenever Anthony came to visit. He would make the exception; surprise Anthony as Anthony had surprised him. When he returned with the tea tray, Anthony was awake and upright, red in the face. He stood still in the center of the room with his hands clasped behind his back and the marks on his face darker than ever.

"Sit down," Gibbs said.

Anthony hesitated. "I'm all over filth, I'll be a dreadful inconvenience."

The dust and street-grit on his clothes was very far from unusual—Gibbs had seen far wealthier men track in far more mud with far less anxiety. And in any case, his most common visitors were Ducky, Abby, and Anthony himself, all of whom would scarcely object to brushing off the sofa before they sat down. "Sit."

Anthony sat. Gibbs handed him the tea.

"Drink."

"Your hospitality leaves something to be desired," Anthony said, but he obediently drank, and a smile broke over his face as he tasted the tooth-aching sweetness of the tea. "I suppose, though, that any hospitality offered to an intruder is something in the way of being extraordinary, though in my defense, you really oughtn't to leave your doors unlocked. Anyone could stroll in from the street."

"No one else would dare," Gibbs said dryly.

"I shall put the word that you offer tea to those courageous enough to attempt it," Anthony said, "and perhaps you will be flooded with housebreakers. I should not doubt it." He drained his teacup. "Well, sir, I thank you for the unlocked door, but I really ought—"

"Who gave you the bruises?"

Anthony touched them lightly with his fingertips. "You've seen me with worse, sir." And so he had—the first time he had met Anthony, if at no other time. But that had not been his question, and so he still sat and awaited his answer. Anthony shrugged. "It matters very little, and in any case, they were not kind enough to give their names before the incident occurred. It was merely their way of letting me know I was—somewhat unwelcome. And they are not, today, without bruises themselves."

That did not particularly surprise him—anyone who made a habit of underestimating Anthony would decidedly pay the price. Still—"_They_?"

"There is no need for such interrogation," Anthony said. "I might have slept on the floor of someone more reticent about questions."

"But you did not," Gibbs said.

"No. I suppose I did not. Three men, sir, and really, that is all I know, and so all you can pry from me." He poured himself another cup of tea. "I do apologize for any inconvenience, I simply—could not think of anywhere else to go."

Gibbs had no idea where Anthony made a habit of sleeping each night—though he was convinced it was not his own floor, it may well have been someone else's, and that thought rested uncomfortably against the thought of Anthony's bruises, obtained in a fight that sounded as unfair as it had been vicious. He reluctantly took up a cup of tea of his own and sipped at it, his mouth curling at the taste.

"Anthony," he said, as Anthony stood again to go. "Next time, choose one of the bedrooms."

Anthony looked at him as if all this surpassed his understanding entirely, touched the brim of his hat, and left Gibbs with a sludgy pot of oversweet tea and a few misgivings about what he had just done.

()

It was two weeks before he saw Anthony again. This was not wholly unusual—Anthony tended to simply present himself at the oddest of intervals, bearing information about an heiress-turned-actress (with whom he'd had quite the acquaintance, or so the constant implication went) or a street rumor turned truth. There had once been a month where he had heard not even a rumor of Anthony only to come outside of a morning and find the young man eating breakfast on his steps. So he had whiled away the fortnight thinking that he was not concerned about the matter of Anthony at all, only to have Anthony turn up on his doorstep dripping rainwater from his clothes and know, by his rush of relief, that he had been quite mistaken about himself.

"Come on inside before you drown," he said.

Anthony coughed. "It may be a trifle late to prevent that," he said, but he came inside and shed the wettest of his clothes next to the fireplace. "Good God. I actually saw animals being gathered up by twos." He collapsed into a chair and coughed again, bent almost in two this time, but waved a hand at Gibbs as Gibbs stepped forward to look him over. No bruises this time, but he was most unnaturally pale. "Not consumption, I assure you, despite the sound of it. I've only been too much in the damp, I suspect."

Gibbs gave him tea. "It isn't your usual."

"I doubt I could stomach my usual at the moment," Anthony said, with a very weak smile, and swallowed it down as if it were medicine rather than drink. "Sir, I hate to impose upon you, but—"

"The invitation was sincerely meant."

"I might have called it more of an instruction," Anthony said. He closed his eyes.

Gibbs thought that there might be a way to tell Anthony that the house had too many empty rooms where only memories lived; he had thought that Anthony would crowd them out, but he had been wrong; had thought that he was better alone, accustomed to his solitude, but he had been wrong about that, as well. Though what he said at last was, "Consider it both," and he realized then that Anthony was asleep, his head thrown back against the cushion.

At least this time, Gibbs thought, he was not on the floor.

In the morning, though, he was gone again, and his teacup was stored safely away in the kitchen.

And the house again was silent.

()

The next time he saw Anthony was when he came out to his stables a week later and found Anthony feeding apples to the horses.

"Do not say that you have been sleeping _here_," Gibbs said.

"They would not mind the company," Anthony said, petting the nose of one of the horses. He named them; Gibbs had not, and furthermore he could never remember the names Anthony had given them, all heroines from melodramas, all brave and beautiful young women. "But no, I have not slipped myself into your household with you all unknowing." He relinquished his last sliver of apple, wiped his hands off on his trousers, and turned around. His smile might have been painted onto him for all the truth of it. He was still pallid from his illness, though God only knew where he had waited out the rest of that, since he had fled Gibbs's house the second the rain had stopped lashing against the windows.

"You're fond of the horses," Gibbs said. "Do they remind you of home?"

Anthony scoffed at this: "If I had a home, sir, I would hardly need to break into yours."

()

Even granting that Anthony only took advantage of Gibbs's unlocked door when he was sick or injured, Gibbs still saw him quite often—Anthony's life did not readily lend itself to keeping him whole.

The one day, he appeared on Gibbs's doorstep not ill, not bloodied, not bruised, only dirty, and looking very tired, and as Gibbs opened the door, he said in a rush, "You'll find yourself regretting it, you know. I've been assured that I am not at all what is wanted, in anyone's house, for whatever reason. Nevertheless, if you intend to make such foolish invitations, I might—accept. There are things I could do to pay for my room—you live almost unattended, I could provide help, I could—"

"Anthony," Gibbs said. "You aren't a servant."

Anthony stood very still and said, finally, "I had far rather serve you, sir, than be a son to my father."

If that were true, then his father had wasted a very great loyalty: what Anthony was offering to him was not something that he could take at all lightly. To mix up his life with a young man prone to such intensity, such folly, such a naked offering of his allegiance—it was perhaps a mistake, and best considered a little longer—

Or, hell, he supposed he could do as he liked—if Anthony could run away from the life Gibbs knew he'd had before, he could take that foolishness onto himself like a contagion, and make an impulsive decision all his own. And in any case, he was growing very tired with finding Anthony on his parlor floor.

"An assistant is of more worth to me than a servant," Gibbs said. He nodded at Anthony and turned back into the house, walking up the stairs and trusting Anthony to follow him. There was silence, but then there came a flurry of footsteps, and he trusted that his smile was not visible from the back.

"Is that a job offer?" Anthony called, still a little behind him on the stairs.

He supposed it was. And, heaven help him, he would have to buy more sugar for the tea.

Though that was, perhaps, a job best given to his assistant.


	2. The Dog at His Command

AUTHOR'S NOTE: And after this, we finally drop the post-something-every-day schedule—I'm going to be a little busier in the upcoming weeks, and while there were will still be stories, they won't be an unstoppable force of daily postings. Next up, though, ought to be the much-requested Lady David back-story—and another answer to another question, though if I tell you what, it absolutely spoils the story.

terracannon876 asked early on about why Mr. Anthony was considered "mad." I think it's partially just his ridiculously over-the-top fondness for plays, coupled with his tendency to talk way more than is normal, but there's also, well, this. (Title echoing the song "Ne me quitte pas.")

()

**The Dog at His Command**

The fight was over very, very quickly.

The man spat out a tooth and a mouthful of blood. "I know who you are."

Anthony stripped off his stained gloves. He was proud of his steadiness. "I am the man who will break your teeth like so much glass from a windowpane, should you not tell me what I need to know."

He ran a thumb down the man's jaw and felt the flesh leap away underneath his touch—_that_ threatened him. He was unaccustomed to being on this end of the violence: always, it had been his own skin that had cringed under someone else's touch. He thought of the gap in the snow Gibbs's boots had made right before he'd gotten yanked up in the carriage and pulled away into the road faster than Anthony could follow. That image of emptiness decided him, and he pressed on. He hooked his thumb into the man's mouth.

"Gracious, what a lot of blood. It's amazing how these things go, isn't it? I've a friend who does a bit in the way of resurrection—very quietly, of course—and he always does say that people have such a frightful amount of blood in them. I shall have to agree."

"You aren't human," the man said, his words turned to porridge by Anthony's thumb.

"An avenging angel, like," Anthony said.

The man turned his head, trying to catch his teeth—or what was left of them—around Anthony's thumb, but Anthony was too quick for him, and merely dragged his lip away from the rest of his mouth as if testing the versatility of the skin.

"You snap like a dog."

"And that's what you are, and all," the man said. The blood from his mouth ran down Anthony's wrist. "Mr. Gibbs's dog, that's what they say about you, the dog who sleeps on his floor and comes when he calls, who hunts for him."

"And kills for him?" Anthony asked lightly. He withdrew his hand and patted the man's cheek. "Sir, I have heard it all before—a dozen times before. If I'm his dog, I daresay I bite far better than you do. Come on, then."

"You're letting me go?"

"Not in the least," Anthony said, resisting the urge to check his pocket-watch and count, again, the minutes of Gibbs's absence. "I'm letting you _stand_, I grow so terribly weary of having your blood and your spit on my hand, it's the ruination of the cuffs, you know. I've no fear of you, sir. Three minutes ago, you had a knife. Now you have only your newly charming smile and I—" He turned the blade in the air, examining the way the streetlights turned the tip of it to gold. "Well. I should say I have the advantage, which means that, dog or not, I have soundly beaten you. The only sensible way for you to save your life at this point is to tell me _where to find my employer_."

"You're _mad_."

Anthony smiled. It felt, even to his own lips, very wolfish.

"Oh yes," he said. "I have heard that before, too."

()

When he did find Gibbs, half-drowned in the Thames like a kitten, he pulled him to the shallows and held him there as he gasped and coughed and vomited up gouts of water so filthy it hurt Anthony to look at it. Both of them were shivering, wracked with the cold, and there was no way they would not come out of it ill and feverish for weeks. Still, Anthony did not have the strength left in him to pull Gibbs the rest of the way to the docks, and so that rest in the low-lit and ankle-deep water was their temporary refuge as he held on hard to Gibbs and felt Gibbs gradually start to hold back as the strength returned to his hands.

Anthony sagged back in the half-frozen water, his chin against Gibbs's shoulder. "I suppose you thought you were dying, sir."

Gibbs coughed again. "There is—blood. On your sleeves."

"Oh," Anthony said, looking at it. "Don't concern yourself. None of that is mine."

Gibbs laughed, and when the laugh turned into a cough Anthony somehow found the strength to drag them both all the way from the water, and they sat on the docks together shivering.

Earlier, standing in the alley, with the man's blood drying on his skin, he had said, _It is true, you know—when he calls, I do come running. But you ought to remember, and tell whomever might mistake me: should there ever come a day when I find he cannot call… then, sir, _everyone _runs_.


	3. The Rules of the Game

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Many, many people have asked about the history of the elusive Lady David—this is what I came up with. Ari, her father, violence, and rules.

()

**The Rules of the Game**

When they were children, whenever their father was not watching, Ziva's brother Ari took her behind the house—wherever they were staying at the time—and lined up jars or cords of firewood or rocks for her to kill while he circled around her like a cat, telling her how to take the recoil of the revolver as it leapt back in her hand. They thought with the blindness of children that if they brushed the dirt from her skirts and scrubbed the gunpowder from her hands before they ran back inside, they could do as they liked in the alleys and the meadows and the ha-has where they played at battle and murder. Ari taught Ziva everything: she learned about knives and garrotes and needles and her own bare, strong hands. After one lesson, about using the flat of her hand against a man trying to grab her, she wiped her brother's blood from her palm and he staunched his nose with a dirty handkerchief, and they went on meekly inside, to the other half of their lessons.

It was years before Ziva realized that there had never been a time when their father had not been watching. When he told her to kill her brother, he knew exactly what he was asking her.

She folded her hands together. She did not ask why her father wanted this of her, though she thought, _It is one thing, sir, to make your children into weapons, but another thing to turn them against each other—and there is no blood to draw there, sir, for we were both steel a long time ago._ An alchemy of flesh to metal. Ziva David existed so that her father would always have her to hand—though for what purpose he held her so closely, she did not yet know, and suspected she never would. It had, she knew, very little to do with religion—her father was not a devout man.

"You have not yet answered," her father said.

"No," she said.

He looked at her. "You refuse?"

"I only agree," she said, "that I have not yet answered."

"It is necessary," her father said.

She did not say that she loved her brother. She did not say that he had been the one who first shaped her hands to their deadliest instruments—she suspected now, and had for years, her father's tacit knowledge of that. She could look back and back and back and still not find the days of her life that were her own, the memories that did not have her father's fingerprints on them. Yet despite all of her best intentions, what she said was patently obvious, wholly indisputable, not an argument at all: "He is my brother."

Her father said, "Let me tell you what he has done," and by the time he had finished, her face was wet.

Whenever Ziva's father had played games with her as a child, she had always lost.

()

When Ziva first met Mr. Anthony, he was barreling out of the side door of one of London's more disreputable playhouses (she was rather confident that it doubled as a brothel during its off-hours, and considering the ramshackle state of the building, they were all off-hours), seized her hand, and said, "An honor, my lady. Run!" So she ran, her skirts flying to either side of her, her hand clasped in his, until they took an ill-chosen turn and found themselves faced with a bald brick wall and no way out. A motley assortment of bearded and unsavory-looking men were closing in behind them.

Her companion stepped in front of her, though he turned back a little to say, apologetically, "I really don't know what it is about me that people tend to find so infuriating."

"You stabbed me!" one of the men protested.

"Do not be such a child," her companion said. "I stabbed you only a little, and only because you would not keep your hands to yourself."

"Oh, she was only a prozzie!"

"She was _on stage_," Anthony said. "A very unusually lit stage in a very unusual play, I will admit, but a stage is a stage, and when she is there she is an _actress_, and interrupting a performance is really in the very worst of taste, and what she does with the rest of her time, sir, is her business—_business_, and I did not notice you paying for your attempted pleasure."

"A gentleman like him," the stabbed man said to one of his burly friends, "fucks his chambermaid, and his little boy's governess and all, but let me get a grab of something sweet, and—"

Ziva tired of him—ducking neatly around her indignant companion, she shot the man neatly in the leg.

"The bitch shot me!"

Shortly thereafter, the whole situation went rather to hell, but it was, in the end, she and her companion who made it safely out of the alley—a bit worse for the wear, bruised and stinking of gunsmoke, but alive and whole. The man turned to her and bowed. "Anthony, my lady, and I'm very honored and terrified to make your acquaintance, I'm sure."

"Elizabeth David," she said. "You seem to be missing part of your name, sir."

"I doubt I have the truth of yours either, my lady," he said, with a smile that she could not believe came naturally to him—it was too bright, like a lamp in the darkness. "Names are most unimportant, I've found. Shall I characterize myself to you? I've no chambermaid, no little boy, and no governess—and am no gentleman at all, as I'm sure you might tell by my habits and whereabouts. You, though, I am sure, are a lady of the very best quality—for I should scarcely stand here courageous enough to call you anything else."

Ziva had been a lady—a gentleman's daughter, a duchess, a marchioness, a princess—everything under the sun. She could pretend to be whatever he would prefer. She said, "I had rather hoped to talk to one of the men in that establishment about some missing jewels."

He offered her his arm. "Then shall we go back together, my lady?"

"I do not need your assistance, sir."

"No, I should think not," he agreed, "but I left in the middle of the second act, and I should very much like to know how it all will end."

()

"You hurt people," Ziva said. "People who had never done you any unkindness. Why would you have done that?" She wanted to tell him that she still remembered how gentle he had been with her when, as a child, she had fallen and bruised or scraped her knees—he had knelt down beside her and daubed at the blood so she would stop crying, when she had still been young enough to cry, and it had been him, not her father or any succession of silent and distant nursemaids, who had kissed her bruises to make the pain disappear. "Did he _tell _you to do that, Ari?"

Ari smiled lazily. "Did he tell you to come here and kill me, Ziva?"

There was no answer to that question that she could give—Ari had taught her everything she knew about their father.

()

The first time Ziva met Gibbs, she tried very hard to avoid meeting his eyes, as well: his eyes seemed just as hard as her father's. They were stones, chips of ice. She could not look at them without remembering things best forgotten.

With further meetings, though, she saw the way he could soften. There was kindness to him that had gone unnoticed the first time. He rolled his eyes over Anthony's tea and sponged blood off Anthony's face. He dusted off the cushions before Miss Abigail came to visit. He rubbed his head when he had to read small print for great stretches of time and when he ate biscuits, he dropped crumbs onto the floor and failed to notice them. He was a man—a good man, a great man—but a man whose flaws and virtues she could see clearly, not a god like her father, who had ruled over her life from her birth. In time, she could not even see the similarities between them without straining herself into a headache: he was his own man, someone she had never met before, and she could love him for that.

And when someone they were chasing grabbed her arm and forced it up and out of its socket, she could love him for the quick-and-nearly-painless way he jolted her back together, and the way he tore up his sheets to make her a sling. The way he pressed a kiss to her temple when it was all done, like Ari kissing away the bruises on her knees and elbows, and she thought, _If it came to killing you, I would refuse. I would say no._

That was a very dangerous thing to think.

One day, for all she knew, he might want to kill her, and for all the softness she had seen in him, she could not forget that there was violence knit into his bones. Even loving him, she could see it still in his eyes—a willingness to kill, if killing were needed, for protection or revenge.

()

"He looked so much like our father," Ari said. She knew, by then, that he had no weapons and no chance against her—he would not even try to fight her. Perhaps he was, by now, simply tired. "And did we ever have a chance against our father, Ziva? Did your mother? Did mine? What I did to them was a kindness."

"No," she said.

"You doubt me?"

"I do not think," she said, "that either of us knows what kindness is."

()

Timothy McGee knew what kindness was, though, certainly: she had trouble understanding how he had come to exist. What had his life been like before he had tumbled into their lives, as ungainly as a puppy, with fresh hurt in his eyes and more courage than any of them had expected? Ziva had not known that people like him existed in the world—or lived so long, at least, without getting that hopeful look kicked out of them and trod into the mud.

"What are your parents like?" she asked him one day, when it was only the two of them in the house. They had been eating ices and jellies that Anthony had _specifically warned them away from_, and they were both flush with transgression and sugar.

McGee blinked, surprised by the question. "Oh, ordinary enough, I suppose, my lady. My father hunts as he can, though he's an exceptionally poor shot, and my mother tries and tries to teach my sister embroidery, which she cannot ever manage herself, though she's wonderful at the pianoforte." He did not ask her what her parents had been like—he had learned early on that, with all of them, it was best to avoid asking any questions.

One day, she was sure, someone would come along who would kiss the sugar off McGee's mouth. She only hoped the rest of his sweetness did not go with it as he fell in love and grew old—she had known men and women both for whom the years had borne away the joy of living and the kindness of youth, and she thought that if she saw it happen to him, it would break her heart.

()

Back and back and back again—did she break her brother's heart, or did her father do that before she was ever born? Or had Ari been born heartless, with only stone inside his chest?

"He should never have had a wife," Ari whispered to her before he died—before she broke his heart in just the way he had taught her when they played at war as children. "He should never have had a child. All I did was set the world to rights, Ziva. All I did was make things the way they were supposed to be—he should never have held her hands when he could not keep her safe."

And she thought, _Who do you mean? _Years later, she still would not know—was it Talia he meant, and their father?

Or Gibbs and his daughter? Gibbs and his wife?

There were, she thought, as she stood again with smoke still all around her, so many dead.

()

Ziva was sixteen, sitting in an English parlor, in the house of a family whose name she could not remember, sipping a cup of tea. Her hands did not tremble. Beneath the gloves, her brother's blood was drying on her skin, but he had taught her, over the years, how to be still when her heart was breaking, and once Ziva learned a lesson, she remembered it always.

()

"Families are dangerous," she said to Anthony, at night and in the stables, Anthony spoiling the horses rotten and Ziva helping because he had spoiled her somehow, too—ruined her so she could never again the kind of her person she had been before.

"I quite agree," he said. "It is very fortunate, then, that you and I have none at all."

She had not been thinking of Ari and her father, of Talia and her mother—she had come to terms long ago with the blood that was inextricable from her bloodline. She had, rather, been thinking of them—Anthony and Gibbs and Timothy McGee—and how each time she saw them, she wanted more and more never to leave them. But she understood that love was as dangerous as family, love was something that could be used against you, and so she let Anthony misunderstand her.

And in the end she left them again, exactly as if she had somewhere to go.


End file.
